CONTENTS

Cover

About the Author

Praise

List of Illustrations

Dedication

Title Page

Epigraph

Introduction

I: 1889–1919

1. The Laboratory for Self-destruction

2. Manchester

3. Russell’s Protégé

4. Russell’s Master

5. Norway

6. Behind the Lines

7. At the Front

II: 1919–28

8. The Unprintable Truth

9. ‘An Entirely Rural Affair’

10. Out of the Wilderness

III: 1929–41

11. The Second Coming

12. The ‘Verificationist Phase’

13. The Fog Clears

14. A New Beginning

15. Francis

16. Language-games: The Blue and Brown Books

17. Joining the Ranks

18. Confessions

19. Finis Austriae

20. The Reluctant Professor

IV: 1941–51

21. War Work

22. Swansea

23. The Darkness of this Time

24. A Change of Aspect

25. Ireland

26. A Citizen of No Community

27. Storeys End

Picture Section

Acknowledgements

Appendix: Bartley’s Wittgenstein and the Coded Remarks

Select Bibliography

References

Index

Copyright

About the Author

Ray Monk gained a first class degree in Philosophy at York University and went on to Oxford, where he wrote his M.Litt. thesis on Wittgenstein’s philosophy of mathematics.

‘This biography transforms Wittgenstein into a human being. It shows his capacity for love, bumps away the hagiolatry, and cuts through a strange layer of po-faced schlock which is perhaps unique to his memory. It ties the philosophy to the life and brings clearly into view the immoderate, brilliant, moving and regularly insupportable genius… For nearly 600 pages Monk moves between quotations, drawing on interviews and letters, diaries, and memoirs of Wittgenstein and his family and friends. He works them intelligently into continuity. His own speculative interventions about Wittgenstein’s feelings and motivations are never pushy or insistent, but well-supported, plausible and at the same time self-effacing… His handling of the early philosophy is admirable. He has a gift for simple exposition, and knows what it is worth trying to get across to a largely non-philosophical audience.’

Independent On Sunday

‘With a subject who demands passionate partisanship, whose words are so powerful, but whose actions speak louder, it must have been hard to write this definitive, perceptive and lucid biography. Out goes Norman Malcolm’s saintly Wittgenstein, Bartley’s tortured, impossibly promiscuous Wittgenstein, and Brian McGuinness’s bloodless, almost bodiless Wittgenstein. This Wittgenstein is the real human being: wholly balanced and happily eccentric, with nothing much in common with his suicidal brother Rudolf, except his homosexuality. Allowed to speak for himself by a self-effacing author, this Wittgenstein knows his own military mind and nature, of which the suicidal gestures were deeply felt, but still gestures.’

The Times

‘Ray Monk studied philosophy as an undergraduate and went on to write a dissertation on the philosophy of mathematics. In writing this book he has shown himself a more than competent biographer and historian of ideas… It is both readable and easy to use, with a full index and bibliography. It is much to be recommended not least for its tolerant, non-judgmental, but sometimes sardonic tone.’

Observer

‘Monk presents a portrait of real complexity: a sceptic (who in his early years was sceptical enough to disagree with Russell that it could be proved that “there was not a rhinoceros in the room”) and yet a mystic for whom certainty of a kind existed – the certainty of unknowing. Monk’s biography is deeply intelligent, generous to the ordinary reader, and restrained about Wittgenstein’s homosexual relationships. It is a beautiful portrait of a beautiful life. After such rigour, such strictness and moral torment, there is a beauty and a release in Wittgenstein’s famous last words, “Tell them I’ve had a wonderful life”.’

Guardian

‘Monk’s energetic enterprise is remarkable for the interleaving of the philosophical and the emotional aspects of Wittenstein’s life. The biographical method here is comparative: Monk shows certain connections, but he does not argue them. He honours the master by his very method and renovates biography in the process.’

Sunday Times

ILLUSTRATIONS

THE AUTHOR AND publishers would like to thank the following for permission to use photographs: Dr Milo Keynes (13); Anne Keynes (15); Dr Norman Malcolm (46); Michael Nedo (1–7, 9–12, 19–34, 36, 39–43, 47, 50–54); Neue Pinakothek, Munich (photo: Artothek: 7); Gilbert Pattisson (37–8, 41–2, 44–5); Ferry Radax (16–18, 48), Technische Hochschule, Berlin (now the Technical University of Berlin: 8); Trinity College, Cambridge (14, 35).

TO JENNY

Logic and ethics are fundamentally the same, they are no more than duty to oneself.

Otto Weininger, Sex and Character

INTRODUCTION

THE FIGURE OF Ludwig Wittgenstein exerts a very special fascination that is not wholly explained by the enormous influence he has had on the development of philosophy this century. Even those quite unconcerned with analytical philosophy find him compelling. Poems have been written about him, paintings inspired by him, his work has been set to music, and he has been made the central character in a successful novel that is little more than a fictionalized biography (The World as I Found It, by Bruce Duffy). In addition, there have been at least five television programmes made about him and countless memoirs of him written, often by people who knew him only very slightly. (F. R. Leavis, for example, who met him on perhaps four or five occasions, has made his ‘Memories of Wittgenstein’ the subject of a sixteen-page article.) Recollections of Wittgenstein have been published by the lady who taught him Russian, the man who delivered peat to his cottage in Ireland and the man who, though he did not know him very well, happened to take the last photographs of him.

All this is, in a way, quite separate from the ongoing industry of producing commentaries on Wittgenstein’s philosophy. This industry too, however, continues apace. A recent bibliography of secondary sources lists no fewer than 5,868 articles and books about his work. Very few of these would be of interest (or even intelligible) to anyone outside academia, and equally few of them would concern themselves with the aspects of Wittgenstein’s life and personality that have inspired the work mentioned in the previous paragraph.

It seems, then, that interest in Wittgenstein, great though it is, suffers from an unfortunate polarity between those who study his work in isolation from his life and those who find his life fascinating but his work unintelligible. It is a common experience, I think, for someone to read, say, Norman Malcolm’s Memoir, to find themselves captivated by the figure described therein, and then be inspired to read Wittgenstein’s work for themselves, only to find that they cannot understand a word of it. There are, it has to be said, many excellent introductory books on Wittgenstein’s work that would explain what his main philosophical themes are, and how he deals with them. What they do not explain is what his work has to do with him – what the connections are between the spiritual and ethical preoccupations that dominate his life, and the seemingly rather remote philosophical questions that dominate his work.

The aim of this book is to bridge that gap. By describing the life and the work in the one narrative, I hope to make it clear how this work came from this man, to show – what many who read Wittgenstein’s work instinctively feel – the unity of his philosophical concerns with his emotional and spiritual life.

I

1889–1919

1

THE LABORATORY FOR SELF-DESTRUCTION

WHY SHOULD ONE tell the truth if it’s to one’s advantage to tell a lie?’¹

Such was the subject of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s earliest recorded philosophical reflections. Aged about eight or nine, he paused in a doorway to consider the question. Finding no satisfactory answer, he concluded that there was, after all, nothing wrong with lying under such circumstances. In later life, he described the event as, ‘an experience which if not decisive for my future way of life was at any rate characteristic of my nature at that time’.

In one respect the episode is characteristic of his entire life. Unlike, say, Bertrand Russell, who turned to philosophy with hope of finding certainty where previously he had felt only doubt, Wittgenstein was drawn to it by a compulsive tendency to be struck by such questions. Philosophy, one might say, came to him, not he to philosophy. Its dilemmas were experienced by him as unwelcome intrusions, enigmas, which forced themselves upon him and held him captive, unable to get on with everyday life until he could dispel them with a satisfactory solution.

Yet Wittgenstein’s youthful answer to this particular problem is, in another sense, deeply uncharacteristic. Its easy acceptance of dishonesty is fundamentally incompatible with the relentless truthfulness for which Wittgenstein was both admired and feared as an adult. It is incompatible also, perhaps, with his very sense of being a philosopher. ‘Call me a truth-seeker’, he once wrote to his sister (who had, in a letter to him, called him a great philosopher), ‘and I will be satisfied.’²

This points not to a change of opinion, but to a change of character – the first of many in a life that is marked by a series of such transformations, undertaken at moments of crisis and pursued with a conviction that the source of the crisis was himself. It is as though his life was an ongoing battle with his own nature. In so far as he achieved anything, it was usually with the sense of its being in spite of his nature. The ultimate achievement, in this sense, would be the complete overcoming of himself – a transformation that would make philosophy itself unnecessary.

In later life, when someone once remarked to him that the childlike innocence of G. E. Moore was to his credit, Wittgenstein demurred. ‘I can’t understand that’, he said, ‘unless it’s also to a child’s credit.³ For you aren’t talking of the innocence a man has fought for, but of an innocence which comes from a natural absence of a temptation.’

The remark hints at a self-assessment. Wittgenstein’s own character – the compelling, uncompromising, dominating personality recalled in the many memoirs of him written by his friends and students – was something he had had to fight for. As a child he had a sweet and compliant disposition – eager to please, willing to conform, and, as we have seen, prepared to compromise the truth. The story of the first eighteen years of his life is, above all, the story of this struggle, of the forces within him and outside him that impelled such transformation.

He was born – Ludwig Josef Johann Wittgenstein – on 26 April 1889, the eighth and youngest child of one of the wealthiest families in Habsburg Vienna. The family’s name and their wealth have led some to suppose that he was related to a German aristocratic family, the Seyn-Wittgensteins. This is not so. The family had been Wittgensteins for only three generations. The name was adopted by Ludwig’s paternal great-grandfather, Moses Maier, who worked as a land-agent for the princely family, and who, after the Napoleonic decree of 1808 which demanded that Jews adopt a surname, took on the name of his employers.

Within the family a legend grew up that Moses Maier’s son, Hermann Christian Wittgenstein, was the illegitimate offspring of a prince (whether of the house of Wittgenstein, Waldeck or Esterházy depends on the version of the story), but there are no solid grounds for believing this. The truth of the story seems all the more doubtful, since it appears to date from a time when the family was attempting (successfully, as we shall see later) to have itself reclassified under the Nuremberg Laws.

The story would no doubt have suited Hermann Wittgenstein himself, who adopted the middle name ‘Christian’ in a deliberate attempt to dissociate himself from his Jewish background. He cut himself off entirely from the Jewish community into which he was born and left his birthplace of Korbach to live in Leipzig, where he pursued a successful career as a wool-merchant, buying from Hungary and Poland and selling to England and Holland. He chose as his wife the daughter of an eminent Viennese Jewish family, Fanny Figdor, but before their wedding in 1838 she too had converted to Protestantism.

By the time they moved to Vienna in the 1850s the Wittgensteins probably no longer regarded themselves as Jewish. Hermann Christian, indeed, acquired something of a reputation as an anti-Semite, and firmly forbade his offspring to marry Jews. The family was large – eight daughters and three sons – and on the whole they heeded their father’s advice and married into the ranks of the Viennese Protestant professional classes. Thus was established a network of judges, lawyers, professors and clergymen which the Wittgensteins could rely on if they needed the services of any of the traditional professions. So complete was the family’s assimilation that one of Hermann’s daughters had to ask her brother Louis if the rumours she had heard about their Jewish origins were true. ‘Pur sang, Milly’, he replied, ‘pur sang.’

The situation was not unlike that of many other notable Viennese families: no matter how integrated they were into the Viennese middle class, and no matter how divorced from their origins, they yet remained – in some mysterious way – Jewish ‘through and through’.

The Wittgensteins (unlike, say, the Freuds) were in no way part of a Jewish community – except in the elusive but important sense in which the whole of Vienna could be so described; nor did Judaism play any part in their upbringing. Their culture was entirely Germanic. Fanny Wittgenstein came from a merchant family which had close connections with the cultural life of Austria. They were friends of the poet Franz Grillparzer and known to the artists of Austria as enthusiastic and discriminating collectors. One of her cousins was the famous violin virtuoso, Joseph Joachim, in whose development she and Hermann played a decisive role. He was adopted by them at the age of twelve and sent to study with Felix Mendelssohn. When the composer asked what he should teach the boy, Hermann Wittgenstein replied: ‘Just let him breathe the air you breathe!’

Through Joachim, the family was introduced to Johannes Brahms, whose friendship they prized above any other. Brahms gave piano lessons to the daughters of Hermann and Fanny, and was later a regular attender at the musical evenings given by the Wittgensteins. At least one of his major works – the Clarinet Quintet – received its first performance at the Wittgenstein home.

Such was the air the Wittgensteins breathed – an atmosphere of cultural attainment and comfortable respectability, tainted only by the bad odour of anti-Semitism, the merest sniff of which was sufficient to keep them forever reminded of their ‘non-Aryan’ origins.

His grandfather’s remark to Mendelssohn was to be echoed many years later by Ludwig Wittgenstein when he urged one of his students at Cambridge, Maurice Drury, to leave the university. ‘There is’, he told him, ‘no oxygen in Cambridge for you.’⁴ Drury, he thought, would be better off getting a job among the working class, where the air was healthier. With regard to himself – to his own decision to stay at Cambridge – the metaphor received an interesting twist: ‘It doesn’t matter for me’, he told Drury. ‘I manufacture my own oxygen.’

His father, Karl Wittgenstein, had shown a similar independence from the atmosphere in which he was brought up, and the same determination to manufacture his own. Karl was the exception among the children of Hermann and Fanny – the only one whose life was not determined by their aspirations. He was a difficult child, who from an early age rebelled against the formality and authoritarianism of his parents and resisted their attempts to provide him with the kind of classical education appropriate to a member of the Viennese bourgeoisie.

At the age of eleven he tried to run away from home. At seventeen he got himself expelled from school by writing an essay denying the immortality of the soul. Hermann persevered. He tried to continue Karl’s education at home by employing private tutors to see him through his exams. But Karl ran off again, and this time succeeded in getting away. After hiding out in the centre of Vienna for a couple of months, he fled to New York, arriving there penniless and carrying little more than his violin. He managed nevertheless to maintain himself for over two years by working as a waiter, a saloon musician, a bartender and a teacher (of the violin, the horn, mathematics, German and anything else he could think of). The adventure served to establish that he was his own master, and when he returned to Vienna in 1867 he was allowed – indeed, encouraged – to pursue his practical and technical bent, and to study engineering rather than follow his father and his brothers into estate management.

After a year at the technical high school in Vienna and an apprenticeship consisting of a series of jobs with various engineering firms, Karl was offered the post of draughtsman on the construction of a rolling mill in Bohemia by Paul Kupelwieser, the brother of his brother-in-law. This was Karl’s great opportunity. His subsequent rise within the company was so astonishingly swift that within five years he had succeeded Kupelwieser as managing director. In the ten years that followed he showed himself to be perhaps the most astute industrialist in the Austro-Hungarian Empire. The fortunes of his company – and, of course, his own personal fortune – increased manifold, so that by the last decade of the nineteenth century he had become one of the wealthiest men in the empire, and the leading figure in its iron and steel industry. As such, he became, for critics of the excesses of capitalism, one of the archetypes of the aggressively acquisitive industrialist. Through him the Wittgensteins became the Austrian equivalent of the Krupps, the Carnegies, or the Rothschilds.

In 1898, having amassed a huge personal fortune which to this day provides comfortably for his descendants, Karl Wittgenstein suddenly retired from business, resigning from the boards of all the steel companies he had presided over and transferring his investments to foreign – principally US – equities. (This last act proved to be remarkably prescient, securing the family fortune against the inflation that crippled Austria after the First World War.) He was by this time the father of eight extraordinarily talented children.

The mother of Karl Wittgenstein’s children was Leopoldine Kalmus, whom Karl had married in 1873, at the beginning of his dramatic rise through the Kupelwieser company. In choosing her, Karl was once again proving to be the exception in his family, for Leopoldine was the only partly Jewish spouse of any of the children of Hermann Christian. However, although her father, Jakob Kalmus, was descended from a prominent Jewish family, he himself had been brought up a Catholic; her mother, Marie Stallner, was entirely ‘Aryan’ – the daughter of an established (Catholic) Austrian land-owning family. In fact, then (until the Nuremberg Laws were applied in Austria, at least), Karl had not married a Jewess, but a Catholic, and had thus taken a further step in the assimilation of the Wittgenstein family into the Viennese establishment.

The eight children of Karl and Leopoldine Wittgenstein were baptized into the Catholic faith and raised as accepted and proud members of the Austrian high-bourgeoisie. Karl Wittgenstein was even given the chance of joining the ranks of the nobility, but declined the invitation to add the aristocratic ‘Von’ to his name, feeling that such a gesture would be seen as the mark of the parvenu.

His immense wealth nevertheless enabled the family to live in the style of the aristocracy. Their home in Vienna, in the ‘Alleegasse’ (now Argentinergasse), was known outside the family as the Palais Wittgenstein, and was indeed palatial, having been built for a count earlier in the century. In addition to this, the family owned another house, in the Neuwaldeggergasse, on the outskirts of Vienna, and a large estate in the country, the Hochreit, to which they retired during the summer.

Leopoldine (or ‘Poldy’ as she was known to the family) was, even when judged by the very highest standards, exceptionally musical. For her, music came second only to the well-being of her husband, as the most important thing in her life. It was owing to her that the Alleegasse house became a centre of musical excellence. Musical evenings there were attended by, among others, Brahms, Mahler and Bruno Walter, who has described ‘the all-pervading atmosphere of humanity and culture’ which prevailed. The blind organist and composer Josef Labor owed his career largely to the patronage of the Wittgenstein family, who held him in enormously high regard. In later life Ludwig Wittgenstein was fond of saying that there had been just six great composers: Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, Brahms – and Labor.

After his retirement from industry Karl Wittgenstein became known also as a great patron of the visual arts. Aided by his eldest daughter, Hermine – herself a gifted painter – he assembled a noteworthy collection of valuable paintings and sculptures, including works by Klimt, Moser and Rodin. Klimt called him his ‘Minister of Fine Art’, in gratitude for his financing of both the Secession Building (at which the works of Klimt, Schiele and Kokoschka were exhibited), and Klimt’s own mural, Philosophie, which had been rejected by the University of Vienna. When Ludwig’s sister, Margarete Wittgenstein, married in 1905, Klimt was commissioned to paint her wedding portrait.

The Wittgensteins were thus at the centre of Viennese cultural life during what was, if not its most glorious era, at least its most dynamic. The period of cultural history in Vienna from the late nineteenth century to the outbreak of the First World War has, quite justifiably, been the centre of much interest in recent years. It has been described as a time of ‘nervous splendour’, a phrase which might also be used to characterize the environment in which the children of Karl and Poldy were raised. For just as in the city at large, so within the family, beneath the ‘all-pervading atmosphere of culture and humanity’, lay doubt, tension and conflict.

The fascination of fin de siècle Vienna for the present-day lies in the fact that its tensions prefigure those that have dominated the history of Europe during the twentieth century. From those tensions sprang many of the intellectual and cultural movements that have shaped that history. It was, in an oft-quoted phrase of Karl Kraus, the ‘research laboratory for world destruction’ – the birthplace of both Zionism and Nazism, the place where Freud developed psychoanalysis, where Klimt, Schiele and Kokoschka inaugurated the Jugendstil movement in art, where Schoenberg developed atonal music and Adolf Loos introduced the starkly functional, unadorned style of architecture that characterizes the buildings of the modern age. In almost every field of human thought and activity, the new was emerging from the old, the twentieth century from the nineteenth.

That this should happen in Vienna is especially remarkable, since it was the centre of an empire that had, in many ways, not yet emerged from the eighteenth century. The anachronistic nature of this empire was symbolized by its aged ruler. Franz Josef, Emperor of Austria since 1848 and King of Hungary since 1867, was to remain both kaiserlich and königlich until 1916, after which the ramshackle conglomeration of kingdoms and principalities that had formed the Habsburg Empire soon collapsed, its territory to be divided between the nation states of Austria, Hungary, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia and Italy. The nineteenth-century movements of nationalism and democracy had made its collapse inevitable a long time before that, and for the last fifty or so years of its existence the empire survived by teetering from one crisis to the next, its continuing survival believed in only by those who turned a blind eye to the oncoming tides. For those who wished it to survive, the political situation was always ‘desperate, but not serious’.

The emergence of radical innovation in such a state is not, perhaps, such a paradox: where the old is in such transparent decay, the new has to emerge. The empire was a home for genius, after all, as Robert Musil once famously observed: ‘and that, probably, was the ruin of it’.

What divided the intellectuals of Jung Wien from their forebears was their recognition of the decay around them, a refusal to pretend that things could go on as they always had. Schoenberg’s atonal system was founded on the conviction that the old system of composition had run its course; Adolf Loos’s rejection of ornament on the recognition that the baroque adornments to buildings had become an empty shell, signifying nothing; Freud’s postulation of unconscious forces on the perception that beneath the conventions and mores of society something very real and important was being repressed and denied.

In the Wittgenstein family this generational difference was played out in a way that only partly mirrors the wider dissonance. Karl Wittgenstein, after all, was not a representative of the Habsburg old order. Indeed, he represented a force that had curiously little impact on the life of Austria-Hungary – that of the metaphysically materialistic, politically liberal and aggressively capitalistic entrepreneur. In England, Germany or – especially, perhaps – in America, he would have been seen as a man of his times. In Austria he remained outside the mainstream. After his retirement from business he published a series of articles in the Neue Freie Presse extolling the virtues of American free enterprise, but in doing so he was addressing an issue that had only a marginal place in Austrian politics.

The absence of an effective liberal tradition in Austria was one of the chief factors that set its political history apart from that of other European nations. Its politics were dominated – and continued to be so until the rise of Hitler – by the struggle between the Catholicism of the Christian Socialists and the socialism of the Social Democrats. A side-show to this main conflict was provided by the opposition to both parties – who each in their different ways wished to maintain the supra-national character of the empire – of the pan-German movement led by Georg von Schoenerer, which espoused the kind of anti-Semitic, Volkisch, nationalism that the Nazis would later make their own.

Being neither members of the old guard, nor socialists – and certainly not pan-German nationalists – the Wittgensteins had little to contribute to the politics of their country. And yet the values that had made Karl Wittgenstein a successful industrialist were, in another way, the focus of a generational conflict that resonates with the wider tensions of the age. As a successful industrialist, Karl was content to acquire culture; his children, and especially his sons, were intent on contributing to it.

Fifteen years separated Karl’s eldest child, Hermine, from his youngest, Ludwig, and his eight children might be divided into two distinct generations: Hermine, Hans, Kurt and Rudolf as the older; Margarete, Helene, Paul and Ludwig the younger. By the time the two youngest boys reached adolescence, the conflict between Karl and his first generation of children had dictated that Paul and Ludwig grew up under quite a different régime.

The régime within which Karl’s eldest sons were raised was shaped by Karl’s determination to see them continue his business. They were not to be sent to schools (where they would acquire the bad habits of mind of the Austrian establishment), but were to be educated privately in a way designed to train their minds for the intellectual rigours of commerce. They were then to be sent to some part of the Wittgenstein business empire, where they would acquire the technical and commercial expertise necessary for success in industry.

With only one of his sons did this have anything like the desired effect. Kurt, by common consent the least gifted of the children, acquiesced in his father’s wishes and became in time a company director. His suicide, unlike that of his brothers, was not obviously related to the parental pressure exerted by his father. It came much later, at the end of the First World War, when he shot himself after the troops under his command had refused to obey orders.

On Hans and Rudolf, the effect of Karl’s pressure was disastrous. Neither had the slightest inclination to become captains of industry. With encouragement and support, Hans might have become a great composer, or at the very least a successful concert musician. Even by the Wittgenstein family – most of whom had considerable musical ability – he was regarded as exceptionally gifted. He was a musical prodigy of Mozartian talents – a genius. While still in infancy he mastered the violin and piano, and at the age of four he began composing his own work. Music for him was not an interest but an all-consuming passion; it had to be at the centre, not the periphery, of his life. Faced with his father’s insistence that he pursue a career in industry, he did what his father had done before him and ran away to America. His intention was to seek a life as a musician. What exactly happened to him nobody knows. In 1903 the family were informed that a year earlier he had disappeared from a boat in Chesapeake Bay, and had not been seen since. The obvious conclusion to draw was that he had committed suicide.

Would Hans have lived a happy life had he been free to devote himself to a musical career? Would he have been better prepared to face life outside the rarefied atmosphere of the Wittgenstein home if he had attended school? Obviously, nobody knows. But Karl was sufficiently shaken by the news to change his methods for his two youngest boys, Paul and Ludwig, who were sent to school and allowed to pursue their own bent.

For Rudolf, the change came too late. He was already in his twenties when Hans went missing, and had himself embarked upon a similar course. He, too, had rebelled against his father’s wishes, and by 1903 was living in Berlin, where he had gone to seek a career in the theatre. His suicide in 1904 was reported in a local newspaper. One evening in May, according to the report, Rudolf had walked into a pub in Berlin and ordered two drinks. After sitting by himself for a while, he ordered a drink for the piano player and asked him to play his favourite song, ‘I am lost’. As the music played, Rudi took cyanide and collapsed. In a farewell letter to his family he said that he had killed himself because a friend of his had died. In another farewell letter he said it was because he had ‘doubts about his perverted disposition’. Some time before his death he had approached ‘The Scientific-Humanitarian Committee’ (which campaigned for the emancipation of homosexuals) for help, but, says the yearbook of the organization, ‘our influence did not reach far enough to turn him away from the fate of self-destruction’.⁵

Until the suicides of his two brothers, Ludwig showed none of the self-destructiveness epidemic among the Wittgensteins of his generation. For much of his childhood, he was considered one of the dullest of this extraordinary brood. He exhibited no precocious musical, artistic or literary talent, and, indeed, did not even start speaking until he was four years old. Lacking the rebelliousness and wilfulness that marked the other male members of his family, he dedicated himself from an early age to the kind of practical skills and technical interests his father had tried unsuccessfully to inculcate into his elder brothers. One of the earliest photographs of him to survive shows a rather earnest young boy, working with apparent relish at his own lathe. If he revealed no particular genius, he at least showed application and some considerable manual dexterity. At the age of ten, for example, he constructed a working model of a sewing machine out of bits of wood and wire.

Until he was fourteen, he was content to feel himself surrounded by genius, rather than possessed of it. A story he told in later life concerned an occasion when he was woken at three in the morning by the sound of a piano. He went downstairs to find Hans performing one of his own compositions.⁶ Hans’s concentration was manic. He was sweating, totally absorbed, and completely oblivious of Ludwig’s presence. The image remained for Ludwig a paradigm of what it was like to be possessed of genius.

The extent to which the Wittgensteins venerated music is perhaps hard for us to appreciate today. Certainly there is no modern equivalent of the form this veneration took, so intimately connected was it with the Viennese classical tradition. Ludwig’s own musical tastes – which were, as far as we can judge, typical of his family – struck many of his later Cambridge contemporaries as deeply reactionary. He would tolerate nothing later than Brahms, and even in Brahms, he once said, ‘I can begin to hear the sound of machinery.’ The true ‘sons of God’ were Mozart and Beethoven.⁷

The standards of musicality that prevailed in the family were truly extraordinary. Paul, the brother closest in age to Ludwig, was to become a very successful and well-known concert pianist. In the First World War he lost his right arm, but, with remarkable determination, taught himself to play using only his left hand, and attained such proficiency that he was able to continue his concert career. It was for him that Ravel, in 1931, wrote his famous Concerto for the Left Hand. And yet, though admired throughout the world, Paul’s playing was not admired within his own family. It lacked taste, they thought; it was too full of extravagant gestures. More to their taste was the refined, classically understated playing of Ludwig’s sister Helene. Their mother, Poldy, was an especially stern critic. Gretl, probably the least musical of the family, once gamely attempted a duet with her, but before they had got very far Poldy suddenly broke off. ‘Du hast aber keinen Rhythmus!’ (‘You have no sense of rhythm at all!’) she shrieked.⁸

This intolerance of second-rate playing possibly deterred the nervous Ludwig from even attempting to master a musical instrument until he was in his thirties, when he learnt to play the clarinet as part of his training to be a teacher. As a child he made himself admired and loved in other ways – through his unerring politeness, his sensitivity to others, and his willingness to oblige. He was, in any case, secure in the knowledge that, so long as he showed an interest in engineering, he could always rely on the encouragement and approval of his father.

Though he later emphasized the unhappiness of his childhood, he gave the impression to the rest of his family of being a contented, cheerful boy. This discrepancy surely forms the crux of his boyhood reflections on honesty quoted earlier. The dishonesty he had in mind was not the petty kind that, say, allows one to steal something and then deny it, but the more subtle kind that consists in, for example, saying something because it is expected rather than because it is true. It was in part his willingness to succumb to this form of dishonesty that distinguished him from his siblings. So, at least, he thought in later life. An example that remained in his memory was of his brother Paul, ill in bed. On being asked whether he would like to get up or to stay longer in bed, Paul replied calmly that he would rather stay in bed. ‘Whereas I in the same circumstances’, Ludwig recalled, ‘said what was untrue (that I wanted to get up) because I was afraid of the bad opinion of those around me.’⁹

Sensitivity to the bad opinion of others lies at the heart of another example that stayed in his memory. He and Paul had wanted to belong to a Viennese gymnastic club, but discovered that (like most such clubs at that time) it was restricted to those of ‘Aryan’ origin. He was prepared to lie about their Jewish background in order to gain acceptance; Paul was not.

Fundamentally, the question was not whether one should, on all occasions, tell the truth, but rather whether one had an overriding obligation to be true – whether, despite the pressures to do otherwise, one should insist on being oneself. In Paul’s case, this problem was made easier following Karl’s change of heart after the death of Hans. He was sent to grammar school, and spent the rest of his life pursuing the musical career that was his natural bent. In Ludwig’s case, the situation was more complicated. The pressures on him to conform to the wishes of others had become as much internal as external. Under the weight of these pressures, he allowed people to think that his natural bent was in the technical subjects that would train him for his father’s preferred occupation. Privately he regarded himself as having ‘neither taste nor talent’ for engineering; quite reasonably, under the circumstances, his family considered him to have both.

Accordingly, Ludwig was sent, not to the grammar school in Vienna that Paul attended, but to the more technical and less academic Realschule in Linz. It was, it is true, feared that he would not pass the rigorous entrance examinations set by a grammar school, but the primary consideration was the feeling that a more technical education would suit his interests better.

The Realschule at Linz, however, has not gone down in history as a promising training ground for future engineers and industrialists. If it is famous for anything, it is for being the seedbed of Adolf Hitler’s Weltanschauung. Hitler was, in fact, a contemporary of Wittgenstein’s there, and (if Mein Kampf can be believed) it was the history teacher at the school, Leopold Pötsch, who first taught him to see the Habsburg Empire as a ‘degenerate dynasty’ and to distinguish the hopeless dynastic patriotism of those loyal to the Habsburgs from the (to Hitler) more appealing Völkisch nationalism of the pan-German movement. Hitler, though almost exactly the same age as Wittgenstein, was two years behind at school. They overlapped at the school for only the year 1904–5, before Hitler was forced to leave because of his poor record. There is no evidence that they had anything to do with one another.

Wittgenstein spent three years at the school, from 1903 to 1906. His school reports survive, and show him to have been, on the whole, a fairly poor student. If one translates the five subject-grades used in the school into a scale from A to E, then he achieved an A only twice in his school career – both times in religious studies. In most subjects he was graded C or D, rising to a B every now and again in English and natural history, and sinking to an E on one occasion in chemistry. If there is a pattern to his results, it is that he was, if anything, weaker in the scientific and technical subjects than in the humanities.

His poor results may in part be due to his unhappiness at school. It was the first time in his life he had lived away from the privileged environment of his family home, and he did not find it easy to find friends among his predominantly working-class fellow pupils. On first setting eyes on them he was shocked by their uncouth behaviour. ‘Mist!’ (‘Muck!’) was his initial impression. To them he seemed (as one of them later told his sister Hermine) like a being from another world. He insisted on using the polite form ‘Sie’ to address them, which served only to alienate him further. They ridiculed him by chanting an alliterative jingle that made play of his unhappiness and of the distance between him and the rest of the school: ‘Wittgenstein wandelt wehmütig widriger Winde wegen Wienwärts’ (‘Wittgenstein wends his woeful windy way towards Vienna’).¹⁰ In his efforts to make friends, he felt, he later said, ‘betrayed and sold’ by his schoolmates.

His one close friend at Linz was a boy called Pepi, the son of the Strigl family, with whom he lodged. Throughout his three years at the school, he experienced with Pepi the love and hurt, the breaks and reconciliations, typical of adolescent attachment.

The effect of this relationship, and of his difficulties with his classmates, seems to have been to intensify the questioning and doubting nature implicit in his earlier reflections. His high marks in religious knowledge are a reflection, not only of the comparative leniency of priests compared with school teachers, but also of his own growing preoccupation with fundamental questions. His intellectual development during his time at Linz owed far more to the impetus of these doubts than to anything he may have been taught at school.

The biggest intellectual influence on him at this time was not that of any of his teachers, but that of his elder sister Margarete (‘Gretl’). Gretl was acknowledged as the intellectual of the family, the one who kept abreast of contemporary developments in the arts and sciences, and the one most prepared to embrace new ideas and to challenge the views of her elders. She was an early defender of Freud, and was herself psychoanalysed by him. She later became a close friend of his and had a hand in his (perilously late) escape from the Nazis after the Anschluss.

It was no doubt through Gretl that Wittgenstein first became aware of the work of Karl Kraus. Kraus’s satirical journal Die Fackel (‘The Torch’) first appeared in 1899, and from the very beginning was a huge success among the intellectually disaffected in Vienna. It was read by everyone with any pretence to understanding the political and cultural trends of the time, and exerted an enormous influence on practically all the major figures mentioned previously, from Adolf Loos to Oskar Kokoschka. From the first, Gretl was an enthusiastic reader of Kraus’s journal and a strong sympathizer of almost everything he represented. (Given the protean nature of Kraus’s views, it was more or less impossible to sympathize with quite everything he said.)

Before founding Die Fackel, Kraus was known chiefly as the author of an anti-Zionist tract entitled Eine Krone für Zion (‘A Crown for Zion’), which mocked the views of Theodor Herzl for being reactionary and divisive. Freedom for the Jews, Kraus maintained, could come only from their complete assimilation.

Kraus was a member of the Social Democrat Party, and for the first few years of its publication (until about 1904) his journal was regarded as a mouthpiece for socialist ideas. The targets of his satire were, to a large extent, those a socialist might like to see hit. He attacked the hypocrisy of the Austrian government in its treatment of the Balkan peoples, the nationalism of the pan-German movement, the laissez-faire economic policies advocated by the Neue Freie Presse (in, for example, Karl Wittgenstein’s articles for the paper), and the corruption of the Viennese Press in its willingness to serve the interests of the government and of big business. He led an especially passionate campaign against the sexual hypocrisy of the Austrian establishment, as manifested in the legal persecution of prostitutes and the social condemnation of homosexuals. ‘A trial involving sexual morality’, he said, ‘is a deliberate step from individual to general immorality.’¹¹

From 1904 onward, the nature of his attacks became less political than moral. Behind his satire was a concern with spiritual values that was alien to the ideology of the Austro-Marxists. He was concerned to uncover hypocrisy and injustice, not primarily from a desire to protect the interests of the proletariat, but rather from the point of view of one who sought to protect the integrity of an essentially aristocratic ideal of the nobility of truth. He was criticized for this by his friends on the Left, one of whom, Robert Scheu, told him bluntly that the choice before him was that of supporting the decaying old order or supporting the Left. ‘If I must choose the lesser of two evils’, came Kraus’s lofty reply, ‘I will choose neither.’¹² Politics, he said, ‘is what a man does in order to conceal what he is and what he himself does not know’.¹³

The phrase encapsulates one of the many ways in which the outlook of the adult Wittgenstein corresponds to that of Kraus. ‘Just improve yourself’, Wittgenstein would later say to many of his friends, ‘that is all you can do to improve the world.’ Political questions, for him, would always be secondary to questions of personal integrity. The question he had asked himself at the age of eight was answered by a kind of Kantian categorical imperative: one should be truthful, and that is that; the question ‘Why?’ is inappropriate and cannot be answered. Rather, all other questions must be asked and answered within this fixed point – the inviolable duty to be true to oneself.

The determination not to conceal ‘what one is’ became central to Wittgenstein’s whole outlook. It was the driving force that impelled the series of confessions he was to make later in life of the times when he had failed to be honest. During his time at school in Linz, he made the first of these attempts to come clean about himself, when he made some confessions to his eldest sister, Hermine (‘Mining’). What formed the subject of these confessions, we do not know; we know only that he was later disparaging about them. He described them as confessions ‘in which I manage to appear to be an excellent human being’.

Wittgenstein’s loss of religious faith, which, he later said, occurred while he was a schoolboy at Linz, was, one supposes, a consequence of this spirit of stark truthfulness. In other words, it was not so much that he lost his faith as that he now felt obliged to acknowledge that he had none, to confess that he could not believe the things a Christian was supposed to believe. This may have been one of the things he confessed to Mining. Certainly he discussed it with Gretl, who, to help him in the philosophical reflection consequent on a loss of faith, directed him to the work of Schopenhauer.

Schopenhauer’s transcendental idealism, as expressed in his classic, The World as Will and Representation, formed the basis of Wittgenstein’s earliest philosophy. The book is, in many ways, one that is bound to appeal to an adolescent who has lost his religious faith and is looking for something to replace it. For while Schopenhauer recognizes ‘man’s need for metaphysics’, he insists that it is neither necessary nor possible for an intelligent honest person to believe in the literal truth of religious doctrines. To expect that he should, Schopenhauer says, would be like asking a giant to put on the shoes of a dwarf.

ethicalTractatus^fn1